by Holly Cawsey
In June 2012, Rio de Janeiro saw the close of Jardim Gramacho, one of the largest landfills in the world. At its height, Jardim Gramacho was the workplace for over two thousand catadores, people who collect and sell materials for a living. In Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump (2018) Kathleen M. Millar offers a compelling account of catadores lives. Through working as a catadora at Jardim Gramacho from 2005 until 2007, Millar observed how the catadores lives are constructed by themselves, the dump and the capitalist systems that wish to ‘formalize’ them. Millar’s ethnography challenges the notion that working as a catadore is ‘an end for Rio’s poor’ (p. 4), showing ‘informal’ work as a way of constituting a ‘good life’.
Millar’s monograph is framed around the theme of ‘continual return’ (p. 4), with each chapter focussing on different ways people arrive and depart Jardim Gramacho. Structuring the book through the analytic of ‘returns’ challenges the notion that wageless work is simply a strategy for survival. Emphasising the agency of the catadores, Millar argues that these ‘returns’ are not simply returns to the dump but are returns to a ‘form of living’ (p. 9); not only a source of subsistence, the dump is a place where values, social relations and new subjectivities are formed, articulated and reproduced. Through redefining the dump as a complex place of creation, Millar can challenge the capitalist work-life dichotomy. The dump is both work and life; the two are inseparable. Contesting the defining of the poor through their deprivation, Millar argues how the work of the catadores is fundamentally tied to how they ‘live well’ (p. 13). The concepts of ‘living well’ and ‘forms of living’ are prevalent in each chapter as a method of retheorizing the lives of the wageless worker and the ‘informal’ economy, helping to question universal perceptions of what constitutes a good life.
One of the most intriguing narratives in the book is when a catadora Marta, tells Millar (p. 59) of when catadores had made a soup on the dump, later finding there were human hands in the bottom of the pot. This exemplified the dump’s quality of being at ‘the border of life and death’ (p. 27). In Chapter One, ‘Arriving beyond Abjection’, Millar investigates how people ‘arrive’ in Jardim Gramacho, interlacing gruesome yet captivating stories like the one above. Through this, Millar shows how the dump is perceived.
Looking at why people ‘return’ to the dump after a period of leave, Chapter Two, ‘The Precarious Present’ involves Rose, a catadora who finds waged work outside of the dump, only to return a month later. Millar (p. 93) argues the precarity of the lives of catadores means that wageless work suits their lifestyles. Catadores are not simply working to survive, they construct their ‘forms of living’ around the dump.
Through participant observation, Millar became aware that catadores were continually ‘broke’ (p. 97). Chapter Three ‘Life Well Spent’, contests the common perception that poor people live lives of ‘scarcity and excess’ (p. 100). Rather, Millar argues that the way catadores spent their money constituted what they believed as the good life. Often money would be spent on others, or on continuing life projects. Lorena, a former catadora, built her bar not through saving money but through buying a brick everyday (p. 109). The spending of money helps to explain why the catadores return to the dump day to day, with Catadores working as little or as often as they need to sustain their projects and relationships. This way of earning and spending is in conflict with capitalist values, perhaps suggesting why catadores are often viewed as ‘outside’ the economy.
Chapter Four, ‘Plastic Economy’, Millar (p. 113) speaks with Valéria, a social worker who works for waste management company Comlurb. Comlurb had been trying to implement structures on to the catadores to ‘formalize’ (p. 133) their work. Millar (p. 137) attempts to retheorize the distinction between formal and informal work by arguing that the catadores work is ‘plastic’ – catadores both give form and receive form in their work and in the economy. This is exemplified in Comlurb’s insistence on numbered vests for the catadores, which were shared, sold and lent, redefining the vests’ form.
Whilst this idea of ‘plasticity’ is helpful in describing the autonomy of the catadores on the dump, it may mask the authority Comlurb can exercise over the catadores. Despite changing the vests’ form, the vests were still required to enter Jardim Gramacho. Catadores were forced to follow the rules of Comlurb, to a degree, in order to gain access to the dump. Millar (p. 223) briefly mentions Foucault, although she perhaps does not adequatly apply a Foucauldian lens in her analysis of the regulation of catadores entering the dump. For example, by using Foucault’s concept of discipline it may have been possible to understand Comlurb’s attempted uses of technologies of power to discipline the catadores. From this we can understand the catadores resistance and ultimately acceptance they of their vests. In this case a particular capitalist work ethic has come to organize and order the lives of the catadores.
Chapter Five, ‘From Refuse to Revolution’, explores the mobilisation efforts of catadores, in the process reframing the urban poor as not simply apolitical (p. 20). Millar argues that when catadores leave structured cooperatives for the dump they are engaging in a political project that resists capitalist labour. This kind of ‘return’ reconstitutes catadores as political subjects with agency in forming their work and lives.
Millar’s conclusion, whilst engaging, is unsatisfying in summing up her main arguments. Millar describes returning to Jardim Gramacho after the dump had closed and exploring what the people she had known are doing now. The framework of ‘continual return’ is not revisited, perhaps due to the dump being closed, after which there was little possibility to analyse her observations as in previous chapters. However, the ethnography may have benefitted from a consolidation of the previous chapters and some resulting theorisations for the future.
Despite this, Millar offers a compelling contribution to the anthropology of work, particularly wageless work. In attempting to deconstruct our notions of what is formal and informal, Millar makes the reader consider how the capitalist economy chooses to exclude particular groups by definition. Millar’s use of participant observation and method of writing creates an ethnography with a real sense of feeling, giving humanity and complexity to the catadores. Theorising the catadores lives as part of a ‘continual return’ reconstructs them as agents, who are choosing to do wageless work in pursuit of the good life. Millar’s work acts to reshape how we conceptualise work and the economy, with the goal of affording agency and dignity to those marginalised by capitalism.
Culture and Capitalism 